p In his fascinating book Vikings of the Sunrise Hiroa Te Rangi, the well-known expert on Polynesian culture, calls the Polynesians the greatest navigators the world has ever known. Perhaps. One cannot but admire the Stone Age men who explored the vast expanses of the world’s largest ocean in their fragile boats. The Pacific islands were explored, Hiroa Te Rangi believes, by well-organised expeditions that set out on voyages lasting many months. Navigational skills enabled the Polynesians to find their way across great distances to the remote islands and island groups that were their goal.

p Te Rangi Hiroa’s hook first appeared in 1938. Some 20 years later the New Zealand historian Andrew Sharp published a monograph on ancient voyages in the Pacific in which he questioned the high opinion of Polynesian navigational skills held by Hiroa Te Rangi, himself half-Polynesian. Sharp maintains that if contacts among the Polynesian islands were so extensive many centuries ago they should all now have the same cultivated plants and domestic animals, for, what with the scanty fauna and flora, these are vitally needed. Yet they do not have the same ones.

p Chickens, pigs and dogs are the typical oceanic trio of domestic animals. (The Polynesians, like other peoples in South-East Asia, use dogs as food.) Yet there were no dogs on the Marquesas 95 Islands and no pigs in New Zealand or on the Cook Islands. And all Master Island had was chickens. Sweet potatoes, which the Polynesians call kumara, the staple food of the islanders, were not grown by the inhabitants of Samoa or the Cook Islands. There are a large number of similar examples.

p Cultural differences were still greater. Only Easter Island had a written language. Only the Maori in New Zealand used curvilinear ornamentation, and so on and so forth. Surely this signifies that contacts among the Polynesians were irregular and accidental.

p Polynesia, Sharp maintained, consisted of many insular worlds, all inaccessible, that could have been discovered only in the course of accidental migrations.

p Many experts on Polynesian culture and historians of geographical discoveries found the scepticism of the New Zealand historian groundless. We shall not dwell on the stormy debates that raged round Sharp’s monograph but merely note that Professor Nikolai Zubov, the Soviet oceanographer, put forward still another hypothesis of how many of the Polynesian islands were peopled. According to this hypothesis, which I mentioned earlier, the islands were not settled through wellplanned expeditions, as Hiroa Te Rangi believed, or as a result of chance discoveries, as Sharp thought, but by way of island stepping-stones that now lie on the floor of the Pacific.

p Today oceanographers and marine geologists consider it a proven fact that a chain of small islands once stretched from Micronesia to the Hawaiian Archipelago. Only two, Marcus Island and Wake Island, are on the map today, and they 96 owe Iheir existence to the indefatigable corul builders.

p When did this underwater land, which could rightly be named Guyot Land, since we learned of its existence thanks to the guyots, sink out of sight? It is natural that the deeper the mountains lie below the surface the greater the length of time since they subsided. A study of fragments of ancient coral brought up from two guyots has established that the guyots were islands about 100 million years ago. At this time, says Menard, many volcanoes in that area rose to the surface through four kilometres of water in the form of large islands.

p Geologists were astonished to find the islands so young. But if 100 million years is a brief span to the geologist, it is an eternity to the historian, for the anthropoid ape had not yet appeared on the scene 100 million years ago, to say nothing of man. The oldest islands of this hypothetical undersea Guyot Land are 100 million years old,  But other land areas there may have sunk much later, perhaps even after man appeared and began exploring the Pacific.

p Only further study will tell us when the last islands and islets were submerged. Some lucky explorer may bring up from the tops of guyots not only reef fragments and smooth pebbles but also objects made by human hands. That will confirm Zubov’s hypothesis that the remains of Guyot Land were drowned in human times and that they were stepping-stones in the peopling of a number of Pacific islands.

p Guyot Land links up the Hawaiian Islands, which are the visible part of the vast Hawaiian Ridge, with the islands of Micronesia, likewise the peaks of an extensive undersea country. 97 Did the islands and mountains drown after Micronesia was inhabited?

p Many scholars, beginning with Macmillan Brown, are inclined to believe that a large tract of land, whose inhabitants created a high civilisation, existed in the region of the Caroline Islands (the abovewater section of the vast Caroline Plateau). Evidence of the civilisation are the monumental structures that have been discovered on many islands of the Caroline Archipelago, a unique type of writing on the islet of Woleai, and the great stone ruins of Nan Matol on the island of Ponapc, sometimes called the "Venice of the Pacific”.

p We mentioned the cyclopean structures on Ponape earlier in connection with Macmillan Brown’s hypothesis of a lost Pacific continent, whose capital he thought Ponape was. The script of the inhabitants of Woleai is no less interesting. In 1913, the year Brown visited it, the island had a population of only 600, and its people waged a constant and difficult struggle for existence. At^ that time only five inhabitants had any knowledge of the script.

p Could the script have appeared after the inhabitants were introduced to European writing, as in a number of cases in North America and Africa? But since it does not resemble any European alphabet or drawings of articles of commerce, Brown concluded that the Woleai script was the remains of a written language once widespread throughout the Pacific continent. Only time can tell whether the British ethnographer was right. American archeologists have begun digging on Ponape, but there is the possibility that underwater archeology will provide the key to the "Pacific Venice" mystery.

p The Caroline Archipelago may have once been much more densely populated and have had many more islands than today. For, says Professor Klenova of the Soviet Union in her Marine Geology, science "knows of cases where coral islands have completely disappeared, such as the two islets in the Caroline group which vanished during a storm and turned into reefs. Ruins of structures and the remains of trees have been found underwater, on top of reefs. Almost every strong gale makes changes in the shape and number of coral islands.”

p A large number of coral islands in the Western Pacific, in a hypothetical archipelago which we might call Micronesia Land, could have vanished during a severe gale in the area of the Caroline Islands, where storms are frequent. The famous Russian traveller and anthropologist Nikolai Miklukho-Maklai recorded a Micronesian legend that many dwellers of Yap Island had come there from another island which had sunk. He noted that maps show a reefTrtffth of Yap which could have been the legendary sunken island.

p On Ponape, where the Nan Matol ruins stand, legends about the earliest inhabitants of the island were recorded at the end of the last century. These were, say the legends, tiny men called Chokals. Not only were they much shorter than the Micronesians but they had low foreheads, broad noses and short curly hair. Ethnographers have recorded similar legends on the Marshall Islands.

Who were the mysterious Chokals? Personages in local fairy-tales? But such tales are always based on reality, no matter how fantastically they are presented. The description of the Chokals does correspond to the anthropological type of 99 the Negrito, a group of Negroid peoples of small slature living on the Malay Peninsula and on Luzon Island in the Philippines. The Negritos have absolutely no navigational skills. Does (his not indicate that they reached Micronesia by land, land that is now at the bottom of the ocean? True, we have no evidence other than folk tales that the Caroline and Marshall islands were inhabited by Negritos in remote antiquity. But I hoy live in the Philippines, and those islands also) lie] hundreds of kilometres from the mainland.